Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Looking for my T-Day post? Click here.I mentioned recently that, sadly, Child's Play Challenges will close down at the end of 2014. Being a member of this team has been a wonderful experience for me. The toy-related inspiration prompts suit my fun-loving personality and my playful scrap style perfectly.

An additional benefit of being a design team member has been the exposure my work has gotten via the CPC Facebook page. I'm honored to have had my layouts featured FIVE times over the last year on the Facebook page, and I thought it would be fun to share screen caps on my blog. The one above is from my absolute favorite CPC challenge--Colorforms.

I just want to say a public thank you to Child's Play Challenges for having me on their team this year and for choosing to spotlight my work on their Facebook page.

I also want to remind all of you that our final two challenges are still open on the Child's Play blog. You have until the end of the month to create a scrapbook layout inspired by our Polar Express challenge and/or our Lite-Brite challenge. If you're looking for some fun inspiration, be sure to check out these challenges. Happy scrapping!

Monday, December 29, 2014

Hello to the "T is for Tuesday" crew, as well as to anyone else who is reading this. Today is our day for sharing beverage-related posts. Here I have a photo from an outing that took place just a few days before Christmas. I gathered with friends for coffee, treats, and crafting time. As I visited with my friends, I sewed together a "Feltosaurus."

Here is the finished product! (The colors are truer in this photo than in the previous one, which has a yellowish cast from the lights at the shop.) I used a pattern from Mollie Makes issue 37 for this cute dinosaur.

This project is a bit different for me, and I enjoyed the change of pace. And since I used buttons from old clothes and fabric scraps left over from previous projects, it is still a scrappy project, even if it's not scrapbooking. :)

My son received Feltosaurus as a stocking stuffer gift, and he loves it! I hope you enjoyed meeting Feltosaurus, too. I'll leave you with this photo of his kooky grin. :)

I loved this month's bright color combo at The Color Room, and I was especially inspired by how TCR design team member Sanna Lippert made three coordinating cards. As you saw above, I felt compelled to make three cards as well.

Card #1 is a Christmas card. I got some design ideas from this snack packaging, as far as the overlapping strips go. :)

Card #2 is a birthday card. I used one of my current favorite stamps, that cute little penguin.

Card #3 is a Christmas/New Year's card. People say that penguins can't really fly, but this little penguin flew all the way to Russia...

...to the home of my friend, fellow paper crafter Irina Rakovets. You can check out her blog to see her post about the handmade card exchange that she and I did this year. (Thanks again, Irina!!!)

To close out this post, I want to say a special thank you to The Color Room. This is their final challenge, one of many that has inspired me over the years. In fact, TCR challenges were the very first ones I ever took part in--even before I had my own blog. I have loved playing along with TCR, even more so this past year when they added a requirement to use upcycled/household materials for each challenge. (By the way, did you spot the upcycled scraps of blue wrapping paper on each of my cards?) TCR girls, thanks for all the wonderful memories and inspiration. As I said in my OUAS post ("I Love Christmas Cards, Part One") this isn't good bye. I'm sure I'll still see you ladies around the Internet. :)

Every Christmas I get cool cards from friends all over the world. Over the years, I've used many different methods for saving the cards in my scrapbooks. I've tried scrapping all the cards, but that takes more than one page. I've tried putting all the cards in a clear pocket, but that makes for a bulky page. Last year, I cut out my friends' signatures from the cards, and that worked really well, making for a fun, interesting, sleek page. I decided to do something similar this year, cutting out and scrapping bits and pieces from my friends' cards, as well as one complete red envelope.

To design the page, I used this sketch from Once Upon A Sketch, where the theme for the month is "It's December..." I substituted the red envelope for the photo (since they're about the same size), and I journaled on the envelope.

I filled in the rest of the journaling/embellishment area with the bits and pieces trimmed from the cards. Here you can see Christmas greetings in English, French, Dutch, German, Polish, Russian, and Hungarian.

The pièce de résistance is this paper star, which one of my friends created from folded tea bag wrappers and a pretty button. She did such a fabulous job on it, I just had to feature it prominently on my page.

Creating an international-themed project seemed especially appropriate this month, to honor OUAS's international team on the occasion of their final challenge. Thanks for all the great memories, OUAS. This is not good bye; I'm sure we'll be seeing each other around the Internet. :)

Monday, December 22, 2014

In honor of Bleubeard, one half of the duo behind the T is for Tuesday link party, my post for today is all about cats!

Bleubeard, what do you think of this idea? Do you think you could learn to make Elizabeth's coffee for her?

Actress Gates McFadden posted this series of six ultra-short videos (each less than a minute long) to her YouTube channel. I think the T-Day crowd will enjoy it.

I agree with Gates and Rudy here. The smell of coffee is excellent.

Gates has performed in many TV shows and movies over the years, but you may remember her best as Doctor Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I don't know why these T Tuesday posts seem to be bringing out my inner geek lately...

This seems like a very complicated way to make coffee. Perhaps she should have taught Rudy to make tea, instead.

Hope you liked that video series. Now, moving on to the scrapbooking part of this post...

Though I no longer have pet cats of my own, I am a big cat lover. Over the years I have owned three cats (all female and known collectively as "the girls"), and I've gradually been making a tribute album about them. Just recently, I completed the last page in the album. I'd love to share it with you. Here it is.

There is a kind of pressure that comes with making the last page in an album. I find myself wondering, what kind of mood do I want the reader to feel when she finishes looking at the album? What kind of impressions do I want to impart? It's an important decision. I considered many different "looks" for the last page of my kitty tribute album, and the look I finally chose is a "lovey-dovey" look, almost like a Valentine (out of season) to my kitties.

As usual, I upcycled some items on this page. The glittery floral image is from a birthday card that I got this year. It was too pretty to throw away. The 3D paper medallion with three dancing figures (representing my three departed cats) is also from an old greeting card.

I also upcycled a kitty charm from an old charm bracelet. The charm embellishes the simple journaling on the page, which reads: "All three girls are always in our hearts."

With the Valentine-like look of this page, I could not resist adding touches of pink--pink glitter, pink paint, pink tulle, etc.

Thanks for stopping by, dear readers, to view this very special scrapbook page. For those of you celebrating T Tuesday, I wish you a happy T-Day!

Monday, December 15, 2014

I know the craze of the moment in Blogland is for Christmas/winter-themed art. But I'm kind of in the mood for fall still. Maybe it's because we're having unseasonably warm weather, with rain instead of snow. When I went out over the weekend, it was so nice to wear a fleece jacket and high heeled boots instead of a parka and snow boots. It made me wish for a pumpkin spice drink, a rare but treasured coffee treat for me. The photo on the left shows how this drink actually looks. The photo on the right shows how it makes me feel. :) The toffee blondie is pretty darn good, too.

With the autumn mood upon me, I decided to make some pages in my art journal, which has a fall theme. First I made a page to enshrine a photo of my friend's "haunted grape arbor."

Dear readers, I have some good news and some bad news for you today. The good news is that it's time for the mid-month prompt to go live on the Child's Play Challenges (CPC) blog. The bad news is that this is the final CPC challenge...ever. CPC is closing down at the end of 2014. But as they say, "Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." I think that our final CPC challenge is sure to bring a smile to your face. In fact, my sample page is all about joy.

For this challenge we invite you to create a scrapbook page inspired by the Lite-Brite toy. I do have Christmas memories associated with this toy. (Thank you, Santa Claus!) However, I don't have any photos of myself playing with the Lite-Brite back in the day. That's okay, though. At CPC, we encourage everyone to interpret our challenges broadly. And that's what I did, this time around...

For my page, I used photos of my son and husband preparing cupcakes. Although my page topic has nothing to do with Lite-Brite toys, you can see how the Lite-Brite influenced my page design.

I imitated the look of the Lite-Brite by scattering confetti across a dark background.

I call this page "The Joy of Cooking," and the journaling reads "Who knew that making orange cupcakes could be so fun! We should all approach life with this much enthusiasm."

I hope that you'll consider approaching our final Child's Play challenge with enthusiasm. I'd love to see your interpretation. You have until the end of December to link your page up on the CPC blog. Happy scrapping!

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Hi, all! Wow, time really flies. It's already the last month of the year, and it's time for my final "Ten on the Tenth" post for 2014. As always with these Ten on the Tenth posts, I put together a kit from my stash and challenged myself to use up the kit by making three projects. Here are the supplies I chose for this month. My kit has a "winter whites" theme for December.

Below is a peek at the flipsides of the patterned papers, as well as some of the smaller items from the kit. Like last month, I decided to err on the side of caution and include in my kit more paper scraps, not less. Again, that worked well, and I was really productive.

As the title implies, this page houses photos and souvenirs from a winter trip to the Lake Superior Zoo. I had fun creating "secret hiding places" for all the memorabilia on the page.

A couple of extra photos, along with a cute stamped penguin, hang out in a pocket at the top of the page.

Clear photo corners hold the snow leopard post card in place. This makes it easy to remove the post card...

...in order to read the information on the back. Beneath the snow leopard post card is--surprise!--a bear post card, which is also removable.

The alphabet rub-ons from my kit were getting brittle with age, so I thought it best to use them all. I decorated a scrap of kraft paper with the rub-ons, then trimmed the scrap into a decorative tag. The tag grounds the flattened penny souvenir that my son made for me at the zoo.

That's it for this post! I hope you enjoyed seeing what I made with my kit of leftovers. I plan to continue sharing my de-stashing efforts next year, but I'll have a fresh new format for 2015. Watch for the first post in January!

This month we invite you to create a page inspired by the poster for the movie The Polar Express. For my design team sample, I took my cues from the falling snow depicted on the poster.

In addition to scrapbooking photos from a snowy day on Lake Superior, I also created a shaker box page accent with falling "snow" inside.

The shaker box started life as a scrap from a sheet of cut-apart cards and the empty packaging from a used-up set of enamel shapes.

To create the shaker box, I first removed the branding card from its plastic sleeve and used it as a template to cut the snow bunny card to size. After placing the snow bunny card inside the plastic sleeve, I poured in a selection of sequins and confetti. Like falling snow, these sequins and confetti can move about freely inside the plastic sleeve when the page is tilted and turned.

I'd love to see your interpretation of this Polar Express challenge. If you decide to play along, you can link up your layout in the sidebar of the Child's Play blog.